‘Breakthroughs’ Category

This week, we’ll be reviewing ayahuasca, the intense and emetic Amazonian hallucinogen long used among various South American communities, in their shamanic practices.

Αyahuasca was relatively unknown outside of these communities until the publications of freak/Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. It was the Schultes lore that lured William Burroughs into the jungle, hoping to cure his opiate addiction, only to be greatly humbled by the encounter. He wrote about this— his “final fix”— in the epistolary Yage Letters, which make as good a brochure as any.

It’s fitting that the first review on Food Spiral would be an energy beverage. Where better than the Food Spiral to transgress the boundaries between Food and Drug? Or, to explore the difference between mere nutrition and true ecstasis? Aren’t we blessed to live in a world where we can purchase a magical elixir for two dollars, drink it with friends in the grit behind a shopping center, by a loading dock and a buzzing highway, and spend the rest of the afternoon wrestling cardboard boxes? Equally, we can read a Great Work, follow it with a canister of radioactive energy fluid, and find ourselves still awake and frothing thirty hours later, on a grassy patch somewhere near our house, in the grips of an Absolute.

With all the different bars and fabulous restaurants to be found all over the world, wouldn’t it be great if you could put them all in one place and burn them to the ground? Food Spiral is a food blog for the rest of us, or at least a food blog for whoever’s left: for the daredevils, the freeze-dried space-food aficionados, the human goats, the bricoleurs, the sturdy, the creepers, the trick-or-treaters, the sidewalk bistro griefers, the soda fiends, the gas station gourmands— for indeed everybody committed to a new Food Transcendence. We know where you live. Taste the Rainbow.

Food Spiral encourages an exploratory connoisseurship freed of all the annoyances and aristocratic encodings of most culinary discourse. In our weekly reviews, Food Spiral will entice our readers with exciting new products, travesties, recipes, hate mail, hot tips, and recommendations on some of the more interesting purveyors of low-quality food items. By way of an induced hysterics, we hope to also overcome some of our own inconsistencies and limitations, and open up a path that might lead us beyond both fodder and haute cuisine.